sunset
by thesocketpuppet
Summary: Connie tries to adjust after the New War with Homeworld. Ponnie. (Older!Connie x Pearl, oneshot, Future AU.)


**sunset**

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 **Summary:** Connie tries to adjust after the New War with Homeworld. Ponnie. (Older!Connie x Pearl, oneshot, future AU)

 **Setting:** Takes place after the war with Homeworld, though it also has discussions between Pearl and Connie during the war.

* * *

 _They won!_

 _That was all that mattered._

 _They won!_

 _/_

 _/_

Pearl's voice rings in her head like someone pounding on the door of her mind, asking to be let in.

 _What's wrong, Connie?_

She does dream of Pearl knocking on the door of her college dorm, as the walls melt around her and she floats into the black. Pearl melts too, until all that is left is her gem, that Connie watches. Pearl's gem shatters in her dreams.

But, they won.

It rings on and on.

Connie wakes up.

/

/

Connie's twenty-two now, a lady with an old soul. It's how the professors describe her. Kids don't talk that way. They say she's cool, she's hot, she's famous. Of course she is. The shadow of the sword she carried all throughout her teenage years follows her to class, and the kids cheer. The dead open the door when there are parties. People are excited to hear how she fought. How she met the Boy Who Saved Them All. Why doesn't he show up? Why isn't he in college? Aren't you bored with this? Can you teach me how to fight?

 _No,_ she thinks, when the question is posed. She apologizes that she lost her sword, that's what she says when someone asks.

She never wants to see that pink saber again.

/

/

 _"_ _Humans are kind of pathetic," she said once, to Pearl. She remembers those words with a wince._

 _"_ _You're not nothing," Pearl said, apologetic as ever for the past._

 _"_ _I meant it as a fact," Connie had replied. "We break really easily, don't we."_

 _"_ _That difficulty is what results in greatness."_

 _"_ _I'm not disagreeing with you. But if you look at the swarm of us – only some of us get to be great, and it's all an accident of luck."_

 _Pearl could only nod her head in agreement. Life was – is – an accident of luck. An accident, that frequently ended badly._

 _"_ _I hate it," Connie said._

 _"_ _There's no point in hating it," Pearl said. "You were given these cards to play. How you play them is limited to the options you've learned you have – again a product of being lucky to know you have options – but whining about it like the teenager that you are won't change it."_

 _"_ _Can't I just be a kid," Connie joked. "Everyone gets their highschool nihilist phase, you know? And I get bonus points for being in a war."_

 _"_ _I know," Pearl said._

 _"_ _You ever have something like that in your life?"_

 _Pearl had long stopped lying to her, though sometimes she lied for her own sanity. This, Connie allowed and never called out on. True Pearl though, Connie liked that Pearl the most. She liked to think that Pearl lied the least with her._

 _"_ _Yes," Pearl said. "There's a story among you humans, about someone who pushes a boulder up and then it falls down and he has to try again. For all eternity. That's what life felt like back in the Old War. We couldn't win, but we had to keep trying. And even before then, when no matter what I did, I would never be whole. You try your hardest to supercede what you were made to be, and the best you can be isn't good enough."_

 _Pearl never opened up about her defectiveness. Connie didn't pry._

 _"_ _What I'm saying is, everyone who knows despair asks themselves if life is worth living. And if they're not dead, then maybe for that day life isn't so hopeless."_

 _"_ _I'm going to get killed," Connie admitted. "Don't sugarcoat it or anything. It could happen. I get scared sometimes that I'm going to die, and on some days I just don't think I can care any more. And on some days I fight because I don't want Steven dead. Or you. Or anyone else. It's weird. Like I'm swinging on a pendulum."_

 _"_ _You'll be fine as long as you can feel something," Pearl said. "Speaking from experience."_

 _"_ _Here I am," Connie said, looking up at the night sky. "Ruining our nice peaceful evening. No battles in a week. I still find it weird that those dots in the sky are stars."_

 _"_ _They'll be back."_

 _"_ _And we'll have to take the fight to them when they do."_

 _That was before the Big Push. After all, the only way to end the war was at the source._

/

/

After the Big Push, Connie still doesn't know why she's not okay. Steven knows she's adjusting badly – but she'd rather sort this out on her own. Not because Jasper's weird warrior philosophy has seeped into her, that brooding apartness that can't really be taken out of Jasper. She'd rather sort this out on her own because she thinks she's been gone from the 'home' that she protected and has no idea what it is like.

Life happens elsewhere, she thinks. Happens in college, where kids her age are three years ahead of her. Happens in her parent's home, which they rebuilt. Happens when she sees kids jogging in the morning. When adults carry their children while doing groceries.

She doesn't know why she feels so apart. Well, duh, her mind says. You fought in the war. They didn't. Some of them deny that aliens ever tried to invade them (it had stung less than Connie expected to hear their exploits all reduced to a conspiracy theory.)

As for adjusting to human things – she's less jittery now than she was before. The meditation helped fix that. She had video calls every week with Steven and the gems, and they respected her decision to get an education at Empire City (though they once barged in on her uninvited).

/

/

 _"_ _It's not healthy to keep it all in," Garnet said once._

 _The problem was that Connie didn't know what was inside, to begin with. And she wondered if she would lash out, be violent one day. Some kids were scared of her, when they weren't in awe of her. It was a lonely tower to live in._

/

/

One day, she wakes up to Pearl breaking the door open. (It's Amethyst's influence.) She wakes up with a yelp, shocking the girl sleeping on top of her.

"PEARL!" she tries to screech, but her voice is hoarse.

"Hello," Pearl says, torn between " _I had to do that_ ," and " _I'm sorry about barging in, whatever was I thinking?_ " She blinks at the girl Connie's in bed with, and then says hi as the girl screams and gathers all the bedsheets for herself, leaving a very generous view of Connie's front for Pearl to see – not that Pearl cares.

Connie rolls her eyes, surprise ebbing into a ping pong match between annoyance and amusement.

"Pippa, this is Pearl. No Pearl, you don't want to pick those clothes up. Believe me, you don't."

"Too late," Pearl murmurs as she picks up Connie's clothes from last night. "You are not to re-wear this. It's all going in the laundry." She holds them whole in her hands, not on the tips of her fingers, her need to clean overriding her disgust for dirt.

"Can you give me something to wear at least?"

Pearl rolls her eyes and throws her something from the closet.

Pearl tosses the clothes into the hamper. "The laundromat is at the basement?"

"Yes ma'am."

"You'd better be here when I come back," Pearl says, before opening the door and disappearing.

Connie shrugs at the pale girl she's been sort of seeing. "That's Pearl," she says.

"I gathered," the girl says dryly.

"Stay for breakfast?"

"She's not going to do freaky gem stuff, is she?"

"She's just really into cleaning."

/

/

Afterwards, Pearl makes them breakfast, returns to the laundromat to pick up the now-clean clothes, and makes sure that Connie sends off her 'companion' properly.

Now it's just them, walking through the university. They stop to sit at a bench.

"Did I make a good first impression?"

"You don't have to," Connie says.

"But if she's your girlfriend –"

"She's not."

"…Alright." Pearl doesn't pry, just as she doesn't pry. It will come out eventually, they know the other too well.

"Why're you here?"

"I just got worried," Pearl mutters.

"Worried. I'm fine. I'm alive. We made it. We won. Please don't tell me Steven is concerned or what."

"I was worried you were trying too hard not to be sad on your last call with us," Pearl says, glancing at her. "You're not eating properly."

"The cafeteria has the nastiest palak paneer ever."

Pearl is about to say something, but Connie cuts her off. "Pearl. Don't therap me, please."

"'Don't give me any therapy,' or 'Don't diagnose me'", Pearl amends. "Don't butcher your Earth language, please."

"Whatever."

"And don't smoke."

Connie holds up an electronic cigarette. "I've switched."

"Does it still hurt when you move your joints?"

She's referring to Connie's scarred sword hand. It was almost mangled – crushed – when she was tossed into some kind of gem machinery.

"No," Connie says, and the truth is that the lack of pain bothers her. Sometimes she touches the scars on her face and she wonders why they don't hurt.

"I got worried when you didn't show up for New Year's," Pearl suddenly babbles.

"It's not because the fireworks freak me out or anything."

"Did you spend it with that girl?"

"Yeah."

"And she's not your girlfriend?"

"It's a casual thing."

"Mm," Pearl nods.

When Connie was younger, she thought that Pearl was pretty. Now that she's older, she still thinks the same thing. Outside of a kiss, back when she was scared of dying, she's not tried any other moves on Pearl.

"You remember when I kissed you?"

"Yes. It wasn't appropriate. You were seventeen."

"And now that I'm twenty-two, how is that any better to someone several millenia old? Human standards change so quickly compared to gems."

"They do, but human development and maturation are facts, interpreted differently by whatever societal lens is available. It doesn't change the fact that you were not an adult."

Pearl has her there. That shuts Connie up for a while. They watch the leaves go down as they do in autumn. The wind is nippy, but nothing compared to the cold of space. The afternoon is almost over. Connie's lost all sense of normal Earth routines, waking up early, or late, or sleeping, or going on awake for days. There's no pattern.

"What made you feel after the war? I mean, apart from Rose Quartz."

"She was the beginning and the end of that list, for a long time. Before I started really… talking to Garnet and Amethyst. And later, Steven."

"I'm having problems connecting, sometimes. Like I can't hear what people are saying. My mom keeps talking about therapy. I don't think that solves everything. And I'm still functioning, you know? I go to class, I eat, I get hungry, I sleep sometimes. Garnet said I should let it all out but I don't have anything to let out. They ask me about the war and I do get flashbacks" – she used to hate that word, it seemed so artificial – "but I'm not… I'm not miserable, I swear."

"What you're doing _is_ letting it out."

"It's always to you," Connie murmurs. "I mean, I talk to Steven a lot too, but it's weird that we've drifted."

"He's deeply hurt by it."

"I know," Connie says. Pearl doesn't have anything to do with that equation: it isn't a case of two loves in Connie's heart. No, it is that their friendship has changed, or Connie has drifted, or something, but she's pretty sure it's her fault, and sometimes talking to Steven is painful.

"Man, Pearl," she says, hearing Pearl's name spoken out loud by her voice. "I might as well just say it: I still don't know why I'm alive. They could have spent that life on someone else. Why was it me?"

Pearl doesn't talk, because she knows that Connie's on a roll. Connie likes that about her, that Pearl learns and changes. "I know it's random. I think it's stupid. And I think it's stupid that a part of me wants to live, but another part of me just thinks – that I can't be bothered. I don't want to do drugs to fix it. I just wish all these chemicals in my head weren't so confusing."

What Connie would like to say is that she feels a little more when Pearl is with her.

"I'm glad that you're alive," Pearl says, not looking at her. "And so is everyone else."

"By the way, when do I grow old enough to court you?"

Pearl laughs, which is annoying. She's doing it to cover up discomfort, which is also annoying. "Our situation makes that inappropriate."

"C'mon, weirder things have happened."

The thing about going through a war, is that just because you've seen lots of beings die, doesn't mean you can't laugh. Laughing can be a mechanical action of an organic robot. There are such things as surface emotions. What changes is inside. Sometimes she's afraid that she can't be enough for Pearl. Like she's both afraid and uncaring of her life. It's the kind of drama where you try to swim in the ocean to see if it matters whether you live or you die. A test for yourself.

"You'll be fine, Connie," Pearl says. "You don't need me for that."

"How do you know? I'm not Rose Quartz, for crying out loud. I do need you. I'm sick of screwing around with other girls just to like, feel good for a second. I'm sick of eating awful palak paneer just to taste how bad something can be."

"You and I are not in the right mindset to pursue a relationship."

"When are humans ever? We're dumb, we don't live long enough, we're careless, I get it."

"Connie," Pearl says, and it's in that angry tone that she rarely uses with her favorite student. "A relationship with me will not make a temporary high into a permanent one.""

"I don't meant to make it… sound like that. Like I'm using you."

"Connie," Pearl murmurs. "Connie," she says again, "You and I are not okay. Whatever we feel, it's not going to be magically fixed if we agree to try something out. I can't give you what you need," Pearl says, "you need time to heal, and time spent with others of your kind. And a part of me might not mind being used, but I've allowed myself to be used in the past, and I… can't let myself make that mistake again."

That shuts Connie up.

"I admit that I missed you," Pearl says, softening the blow. "Now is not the time."

"I deserved that," Connie mutters. "Being a little self-centered shit is too easy."

"I was clingy myself," Pearl says. "And needy. Before, I mean."

Oh, Connie knows what she means.

"What do we do now?"

"I want to cook you dinner," Pearl says.

"How about a sleepover?"

"Yes, it would be nice to talk about less depressing things."

There might be hope yet, a voice says in her head. The voice sounds like the narrator in old-time movies.

There might be hope yet, Connie thinks, as she walks into the sunset with Pearl. There's a future out there, maybe even one where the both of them work things out.

It's the first thing she's looked forward to in a very long time.


End file.
